Senior Database Platform Engineer - Scale & Innovate

Block; Oakland (CA); On-site; USD 196,000 - 327,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

Retirement savings plans

Job summary

Block is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Data Stores team within Product Platform Engineering. You will design and operate database and storage platform software, building APIs and tools to automate provisioning, migrations, and upgrades.

The role covers backend services, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling. You will work across database behavior, application code, distributed systems, and networking to deliver pragmatic solutions, collaborating with

Qualifications

• 5+ years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree or 3 years with a Master’s degree.
• Experience building and operating backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems with production relational databases.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across unfamiliar systems and domains.
• Understanding of transactions, indexing, replication, schema evolution, and query performance.
• Experience in database infrastructure, distributed storage, migrations, cloud services, or developer tooling.
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into clear plans and solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate database and storage platform software for Block engineers.
• Build services, APIs, and tooling for provisioning, migrations, upgrades, and lifecycle ops.
• Solve database scaling and performance while preserving data correctness and availability.
• Collaborate across database behavior, application code, and cloud infra to deliver pragmatic solutions.
• Partner with teams on schema design, query patterns, and platform adoption.
• Unify and modernize data store platforms to reduce toil and enforce safe practices.
• Lead technical projects from framing to rollout, including on-call ownership.
• Balance performance, reliability, cost, maintainability, and developer experience.
• Leverage AI tools to accelerate development with careful review and testing.
• Foster a culture of curiosity, ownership, and shipping reliable software.

Skills

Database design

Distributed systems

Go programming

Cloud infrastructure

AI tooling

Debugging production

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Master’s degree

Tools

MySQL

AWS Aurora

Vitess

DynamoDB

Redis

OpenSearch

Kubernetes

Go

Java

Ruby

Job description

Block is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Data Stores team within Product Platform Engineering. You will design and operate database and storage platform software, building APIs and tools to automate provisioning, migrations, and upgrades.

The role covers backend services, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling. You will work across database behavior, application code, distributed systems, and networking to deliver pragmatic solutions, collaborating with